Crazy Defense Heroes has been getting quite a bit of attention recently, as a fairly new tower defense game for iOS. But as we mentioned previously, this title from Animoca is more than just your average tower defense game, as it also combines elements of RPGs and collectible card games, as your objective is to defeat enemies across hundreds of levels and a host of different worlds with the right combination of cards, may they be towers, other heroes like your own player avatar, spells, or whatnot. There is no shortage of levels for you to perfect your strategy and come up with the right mix of cards to play, though that’s something you probably know, now that you may be in the intermediate to advanced ranks.

We don’t need to remind you about the depth this game has to offer, despite the back-to-basics graphics. We wouldn’t have created two guides in recent days, with this third one coming up. But here it is, without further ado — our third, and final Crazy Defense Heroes strategy guide, where we offer some advanced tips for anyone who’s at level 6 and beyond. At this point, it becomes harder to get a perfect three stars in the game’s campaign levels, so we hope to help make it easier for you to ace those levels and earn the best possible rewards.

1. Missions – A Quick And Effortless Way To Collect Resources

In our second Crazy Defense Heroes guide, we talked about the Scavenge feature, which allows you to instantly “grind” through a previously completed level (instantly, meaning it’s all done with one click — no need to rewatch the battle) and earn select resources, depending on the level you’re scavenging through. Missions, which become available once you reach level 6, are similar in the sense that you don’t actually have to do anything except tap once on the corresponding button, but in order to qualify for a mission, you’ll need to have cards of a certain type or rarity. Missions are also tiered in order of difficulty, ranging from Trivial to Hard, although there’s no need to worry about any actual difficulty on your part; this merely determines how long it takes for a mission to complete.

You can earn a variety of rewards through the missions, though this would usually be coins, Automation Charges (for auto-battles) and Energy Potions (see below). More difficult missions, naturally, mean better rewards, so if you’re going to be away from the game for quite some time, you might as well load up one of those Hard missions so you can return to Crazy Defense Heroes ready to claim some useful resources.

2. Use Energy Potions First, Spend Gems Only If You’re Loaded

When we say Energy Potions, we’re not talking about the green potion bottles on the top portion of the screen — these refer to your energy units, but these are different from Energy Potions, which are the blue bottles you normally win by completing the aforementioned missions. You can use these items whenever you’re in a situation where you’re all out of energy for a certain task, such as a campaign level or a scavenge level; these take the place of your usual energy and allow you to complete the task even if you don’t have any more actual energy.

If you’re out of Energy Potions and conventional energy, the game will ask you to spend gems to buy new Energy. This is something you should only do if you’ve got way more than enough gems, as that’s going to cost you 50 gems for a simple refill!

3. Acing The Harder Levels – Initial Towers Should Be Near Escape Points

As you should know at this point, battles in Crazy Defense Heroes would start out with only a limited amount of mana for the placement of towers and any sidekicks (e.g. Centurion, Knuckle, etc.) whom you wish to fight alongside you in battle. This becomes a bigger problem as you progress through the game’s map, as it becomes more difficult to earn three stars for your first try at completing a level. Indeed, the quality of your cards won’t catch up as fast to keep up with the game’s ramping-up difficulty, but there are a few things you can do to mitigate the damage at the very least, or to ideally help you get a three-star level.

Since we’re talking about the start of battles here, we recommend placing your initial towers mostly near the enemies’ escape points; usually, this would be the opposite side of where they could possibly emerge from, but in all cases, these are points close to the edges of the level’s map, where you can lose enemies as they disappear from the screen. You can only set up so many towers with the mana you’ll have, so make sure you’re also using your better towers. Just don’t neglect placing towers near the entry points, so you can at least slow them down, or take out weaker enemies (like the rats) before the enemy waves become overwhelming.

4. Scout Your Enemy, Then Access The Bestiary

You may be overlooking this pre-battle feature when the levels are easy and you can get three stars with your eyes closed. But when the going gets tough, you’ll need to start preparing in advance by scouting your opponent. This will show you the exact number of enemies of each applicable kind that you can expect in a level, and with that information in mind, you should have a good idea of what type of towers you should be placing before the battle. Usually, this would mean focusing on the escape points by setting up rarer towers that cost more mana to build, as we mentioned above, but if you see a lot of low-level enemies, you don’t need to focus much on tower rarity when following the above tip.

In relation to what we mentioned in the first paragraph, the battle screen’s pause menu has an option where you can access the Bestiary, which includes all the information you need to know on enemies whom you’ve already encountered. Not only will you learn how many hit points they have, what type of special attacks they use, or how much damage they deal out, you’ll also see how many hearts they will cost you if you let them escape. That’s right — once you reach a certain point, not all enemies in Crazy Defense Heroes will be worth one heart, and that’s what leads us to the very next tip.

5. Some Enemies Are Worth More Than One Heart

This is something you’ll also notice once you reach the third or fourth stage of campaign mode, and it’s very important if you want to at least finish the level with two stars, should an enemy or two get away. There are some enemies, usually the sturdier ones, that will cost you more than the usual one heart if you allow them to escape. While losing just one single enemy will always make the difference between a solid two-star effort and a spectacular three-star level completion, losing more than one enemy worth two or more hearts could take you down to one-star territory, especially when you’ve only got 10 hearts to lose in a level! Just as we mentioned above, access the Bestiary if you need more information on the enemies you’ll be facing.

6. Keep Your Avatar And Any Sidekicks Active While You Don’t Have Enough Towers Yet

Earlier, we established that you often won’t have enough mana to work with in the harder levels, which would force you to set up only a few towers, mainly those that cost a lot of mana and do a lot of damage. With a lack of firepower from the towers, chances are you’ll have to be active during the first few waves of enemy attacks, using your avatar and any sidekick whose card you’ve played to take the enemies head-on and minimize the chances of anyone escaping. We did mention in a previous guide that it does work if your avatar and/or sidekick is positioned next to the escape points, but that’s not always the smartest idea, especially in the early parts of the more difficult levels. Even rats could escape if you aren’t careful — we’ve seen this happen a couple of times, and it’s rather embarrassing, to be honest about it!

7. Should You Speed Up Battles?

Crazy Defense Heroes tells you from the earlier parts of the game that you have the option to speed up battles, though this could be a risky process. Once you’ve become an expert at the game, with the levels taking progressively longer to complete, you may want to take advantage of this feature. In fact, you may already be using this feature on a regular basis, as we can’t blame you if you get impatient waiting for the enemy waves to arrive. Our best advice when it comes to the speed-up feature (you can activate this by hitting the fast-forward button on the upper right of the battle screen) is to use it while waiting for enemy waves, or during the early parts of their attacks, but not once they’re more than halfway past escaping, At that point, you’ll need to mobilize your avatar/activate your spells/upgrade towers to make sure you don’t lose any enemy unit!

8. What To Expect During Raids

Raids become available once you reach avatar level 6, and these are essentially the usual battles you’ll get in campaign mode, but with varying difficulties as indicated — Easy, Medium, and Hard. You’ll want to go here if you’re trying to win some evolution materials, which are used in recipes when you’re trying to rank up one of your cards. While evolution materials can occasionally be won during campaign battles or by opening chests, Raids primarily focus on them as the main type of reward, though you’ll need to wait a while before unlocking new difficulties — Medium becomes available once you reach level 15, and Hard once you reach level 25. Also take note that these are limited-time events, and that it could take some time (one day, to be exact) before you can attempt a Raid again!

9. Two Identical Cards Of Different Rarities Does Not Make A Dupe

We thought we’d include this in our advanced guide since it’s something we failed to mention in the intermediate guide, while talking about duplicate cards, and the ability to convert these cards into instant resources. (Unlocking a dupe also allows you to get a damage bonus, so count that as another thing we neglected to mention earlier on!) You’ll certainly encounter situations where you end up unlocking a new card, albeit one that’s of a higher star rarity than the exact same card you already have. These are not duplicates, unfortunately, and while we hope the game allows you to do something with these dupes-but-not-dupes in the future (you would, after all, want to level up a two-star Snowball Tower rather than the one-star you had for a while, due to its higher upside), it’s just something you’ll have to deal with for the meantime.

10. Two Sidekicks, Two Towers?

Alternately, when going to battle, you have the option of fielding two sidekicks, instead of using just one, with two towers instead of the usual three. Although you may intuitively prefer to have more towers, preferably one low-cost type (Snowball or Archer tower), one in the middle of the road, meaning a cost of around 100 mana (Lightning tower), and one expensive type that costs about 125 mana or more (Pirate or Mortar towers), it may be a good idea to simplify things in terms of towers, and field two sidekicks to fight alongside your avatar. Since you might not have much to choose from as far as top-tier sidekick cards are concerned, you could play the cards of two melee fighters, e.g. Centurion, Dundee, and/or Knuckle. Ideally, however, you’re better off with one melee sidekick and one ranged sidekick. Don’t worry if you’re used to playing campaign levels with three tower types — you’ll unlock more open slots for cards as you level up!